Skhandas and the self

Jeffrey

The five skhandas are a basic idea in Buddhism. Skhanda means 'heap' I think and Buddha used it as a way to see what a being is and possibly through that investigation to see what a being is not. I put this in beginner because the quotation I will type up is something that we can see right here and right now.

From Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness by Khenpo Gyamptso Tsultrim Rinpoche

Form

Form refers to the body and the environment. We take for granted that there is a world 'out there' beyond our senses and that our body partakes of that world. When we sit down to meditate it is the body and its environment that first catch our attention. So we can start our investigation there. I am sitting here because my body is sitting here. Is that 'I' therefore the body? One can examine the body systematically taking it limb by limb, organ by organ. Is my hand me? Am I still me without my hand? What is a hand anyway? Is it still a hand without fingers? Without skin? Without bone? Without flesh? When it is broken down in this way one finds that 'hand' is merely a convenient concept. There is no such thing thing as a 'hand' as such. It is the same for every part of the body. It is the same right down to the tiniest cell, and the tiniest atom and the tiniest part of an atom as scientists know only too well. However far one investigates one will always find more parts and each part is given a name, each part will be found to break up into something other than itself. The process is endless.

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Examining the body in this way one may come to the conclusion that 'I' and 'body' are merely convenient concepts for dealing with the world and experience. They have a certain relative reality, but they are not absolutes. In the relative truth they are streams of events that one labels as 'I' or 'body'. But that 'I' or 'body' cannot be said to have lasting, separate, independent existence. If the body had such existence it might have been called the self, but it does not have, and however much one were to investigate it, it never would have. It is not self and self is not the body.

Feeling

Feeling here refers to those of pleasure, displeasure, and indifference. For example, as one sits in meditation, one may like it and want to stay, or one may not and want to leave. The only other alternative is that one may not care one way or the other. Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we are always experiencing one or the other of these feelings. They are not self, however, because none of them is lasting; they take turns in arising; now there is happiness, now sadness and so on. Self could not be the feelings because they are always changing.

Perception

Perception here refers to the first moment of recognition of input through the senses. When one experiences a color such as blue, when one feels an itch one recognizes the feeling, or when one hears a car starting up one recognizes the sound, the same applies to smells, etc,. We experience a continual stream of perceptions through our senses all the time we are awake. We are either listening to something, looking at something, feeling something with our sense of touch, tasting or smelling something or even receiving the image of something arising in the mind. As one sits in meditation one might be perceiving the breath moving in and out, images floating into the mind, or noises going on in the street outside and so on. Although one thinks it is one's 'self' that is perceiving these things one does not think these perceptions are the self. None of these has the characteristics of self since none of them is lasting.

Mental Construction

Mental constructions include all the mental activity of thinking, patterns of thought, negative emotions such as desire, pride, jealousy, and healthy emotions such as love, devotion, and patience. In fact feeling and perceptions are mental constructions too, but for the sake of this categorization they are here listed separately. The term in Sanskrit for this heap is samskara. Samskara also has the meaning of predisposition in the sense of tracks left by former deeds that condition one's present thinking and behaviour. The Tibetan term 'dus gyed' is a general term meaning mental constructions of any kind. Although we should understand that everything that arises in the mind is conditioned by what has gone before, in general we can just take this skhanda to mean all mental events not included in the other three mental skhandas.

Although we do not think of mental constructions or mental events as being 'self', we do tend to identify our 'self' with what we conceive to be our personality. Emotionally, if some part of our personality is criticized, we feel we (our self) has been critcized. However, if one examines the make-up of one's personality very carefully and dispassionately one finds it even more intangible than the body. At least with the body one was sure what was included as part of it, even though none of it could be identified as the self. With one's personality, on the other hand, one just has a stream of ever-changing mental constructions and events. One tends to choose certain, more or less constant features of this stream as characteristics of a particular personality, and when they are manifest one feels a person is being himself. If he starts to manifest (again in a more or less constant fashion) totally different characteristic, we talk about him having a change of personality. We talk of people not being in their right mind, of being temporarily deranged and so on. The implication is that there is a person or 'self' other than the present personality or mind state. It is clearly not the personality or any of the mental constructions or events that constitute it, since noen of them exhibits a separate, independent, lasting element that one could call the 'sefl'.

Consciousness skhanda to come...

Buddhadragon

Bikkhu Bodhi, on the relationship between the skandhas and dukkha:
"The five aggregates of clinging are a classificatory scheme for understanding the nature of our being. What we are, the Buddha teaches, is a set of five aggregates -material form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness- all connected with clinging. We are the five and the five are us. Whatever we identify with, whatever we hold to as our self, falls within the set of five aggregates. Together these five aggregates generate the whole array of thoughts, emotions, ideas, and dispositions in which we dwell, 'our world.' Thus the Buddha's declaration that the five aggregates are dukkha in effect brings all experience, our entire existence, into the range of dukkha. [...]
The reason [the Buddha] says that the five aggregates are dukkha is that they are impermanent. They change from moment to moment, arise and fall away, without anything substantial behind them persisting through the change. Since the constituent factors of our being are always changing, utterly devoid of a permanent core, there is nothing we can cling to in them as a basis for security. There is only a constantly disintegrating flux which, when clung to in the desire for permanence, brings a plunge into suffering."

Toraldris

@dharmamom I've read some of Bhikkhu Bodhi's stuff, and though I don't always agree with him I definitely find that quote to be spot-on. Where I tend to disagree is when he talks about things like devas and hungry ghosts as if they're real instead of metaphors or states of mind (unless I'm mis-remembering him!).

Buddhadragon

No, you remember well. I also find devas and hungry ghosts are states of mind (you might like Mark Epstein's "Thoughts without a thinker," for that one.)
We can't agree on everything, of course, but Bodhi's "The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the end of suffering," still makes a fantastic introduction to basic notions of Abhidharma.

Citta

@AldrisTorvalds said:
dharmamom I've read some of Bhikkhu Bodhi's stuff, and though I don't always agree with him I definitely find that quote to be spot-on. Where I tend to disagree is when he talks about things like devas and hungry ghosts as if they're real instead of metaphors or states of mind (unless I'm mis-remembering him!).

I suggest that you put hungry ghosts and devas on the backburner.

People much wiser and saner than me claim experience of them.

I don't feel that I have wisdom to doubt their experience.

Buddhadragon

Experience with devas and hungry ghosts would make an interesting thread, dare I say?
Treated with all due respect and seriousness.

Toraldris

@Citta People claim being abducted by UFOs too, and have vivid memories of such. The mind is a great trickster. Look at all of the religions and gods that humans have worshiped, and all the collective experiences and beliefs. Is it more sane to think that these are real, or that they are products of the mind? I find that skepticism is the real wisdom, rather than attributing an infallibility and weightiness to the experiences of others that has no solid justification. Even intelligent people believe things without justification, and all of our minds are capable of deceiving us.

Citta

The people who claim abduction by UFO's are as far as I know not experienced meditators and teachers of meditation, neither do they exhibit the fruits of Dharma..patience, loving kindness, deep wisdom, warmth of personality and equanimity.

The fact is @aldrisTorvalds the more you encounter Buddhist practitioners with those qualities, the more likely they are to have experiences that you would classify as supernatural.

Over the decades the Dharma practitioners that I have met who are the most down to earth, humorous, and grounded in their presence are the very ones who speak first hand of Devas and so on.

Toraldris

@Citta As supernatural as dreams. Namaste, Citta.  

Citta

Stick around a decade or three @AldisTorvalds..go and meet the old timers in Dharamsala, or Sri Lanka or Kyoto.

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pegembara

Sabbe sankhara anicca - all constructions are impermanent
Sabbe sankhara anatta - all constructions are not self

Sankhara: Conditioned phenomenon; fabrication; fashioning. This term covers all things, physical or mental, fashioned by causes or conditions, as well as the forces fashioning them and the processes by which they are fashioned.

Self is a construction and can therefore be taken apart until its true nature is revealed.

pegembara

It is striking how similar some of the practices are with Thai Buddhism. Perhaps not surprising as the came from the same Teacher.

So we have to develop the power of samādhi. Investigating the body
as elements is one method we can use, dividing the body into four
parts. Like someone cutting up a cow into four parts. Get in there and
investigate every part, bit by bit. The earth element is all the harder
parts of the body. The liquid parts that have the characteristic of
being fluid and soft is the water element. The air element is basically
the breath, and the places where there is warmth is the fire element.
All the four elements combine together to fulfill their purpose. Yet in
the end when they all break apart and disintegrate we can’t find any
being, person, I, us or them.

Path of the Sotapanna
pg 22

http://www.watmarpjan.org/en/pdf/en-SOTA-LOW.pdf

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"Furthermore, the monk reflects on this very body from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin and full of various kinds of unclean things: 'In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.' Just as if a sack with openings at both ends were full of various kinds of grain — wheat, rice, mung beans, kidney beans, sesame seeds, husked rice — and a man with good eyesight, pouring it out, were to reflect, 'This is wheat. This is rice. These are mung beans. These are kidney beans. These are sesame seeds. This is husked rice'; in the same way, the monk reflects on this very body from the soles of the feet on up, from the crown of the head on down, surrounded by skin and full of various kinds of unclean things: 'In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, bone marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, large intestines, small intestines, gorge, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.' And as he remains thus heedful, ardent, & resolute, any memories & resolves related to the household life are abandoned, and with their abandoning his mind gathers & settles inwardly, grows unified & centered. This is how a monk develops mindfulness immersed in the body.

"Furthermore, the monk contemplates this very body — however it stands, however it is disposed — in terms of properties: 'In this body there is the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, & the wind property.' Just as a skilled butcher or his apprentice, having killed a cow, would sit at a crossroads cutting it up into pieces, the monk contemplates this very body — however it stands, however it is disposed — in terms of properties: 'In this body there is the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, & the wind property.' And as he remains thus heedful, ardent, & resolute, any memories & resolves related to the household life are abandoned, and with their abandoning his mind gathers & settles inwardly, grows unified & centered. This is how a monk develops mindfulness immersed in the body.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.119.than.html

Buddhadragon

Even if I don't personally care for supernatural life, it does not mean it does not exist.
I accept there are many things in life beyond my understanding and like @Citta said, I choose to put those things in the backburner, for the time being, with all due respect for people who know better about these things or care about them.

DairyLama

@dharmamom said:
Bikkhu Bodhi, on the relationship between the skandhas and dukkha:

Since the constituent factors of our being are always changing, utterly devoid of a permanent core, there is nothing we can cling to in them as a basis for security. There is only a constantly disintegrating flux which, when clung to in the desire for permanence, brings a plunge into suffering."

Yes, it seems that the problem is grasping at the aggregates, identifying with them as me or mine.

Jeffrey

Now the section on the fifth skhanda, consciousness.

Consciousness

A consciousness in Buddhism refers to a moment of awareness. As we think about the four skhandas that have already been listed we might feel that behind all of them there is a general sense of awareness or knowing. We might call it the mind itself as opposed to the mental events that occur within it. We might feel that this is really what we mean by the 'I' or the 'self'. It seems to be an unchanging , separate, independent awareness that is just going on as the basis of all our experience.

Generally speaking we think of our life and experience going along as a sort of stream in time and space. There is a sense of beginning and end and one event following on from another. Even though one does not think exactly in terms of a moment of experience having edges around it, nevertheless there is a sense of its ending somewhere, or otherwise it would just merge into everything else. So our experience and our sense of self is definitely bound by time and space. Therefore, it must be possible to divide it up into the smallest conceivable parts and the smallest conceivable moments of experience in order to be sure that one has missed nothing in one's search for a lasting, separate, independent self.

What one finds is that every moment of experience has two aspects. If it did not have these aspects it could hardly be counted as being a moment of experience at all. What are these two aspects? Tehre has to be something to experience and something to experience it. In other words there is always something knowing something or being aware of something. If either of these elements were missing there would be no experience. These smallest conceivable moments of consciousness arising dependent on their corresponding momentary obect of consciousness are what in Buddhism are known as consciousness. The term is vijnana (rnam shes in Tibetan) The 'vi' part of the world can mean partial or divided. Thus , a consciousness is a partial or divided knowing. This contrasts with jnana which means simply knowing or wisdom. The difference between jnana and vijnana becomes very important in the later stages of progression of meditation on emptiness.

The upshot of this rather long discussion on what is meant by consciousness in Buddhism is that when, in the hope of resolving one's difficulties, one suggests that the self is that continuing awareness that is behind all one's experience, one must in fact be referring to the stream of vijnanas. One may not have analyzed it as deeply as that, but if one still accepts common-sense notions of time and space, then the nature of consciousness of form, sound, smell, taste, touch or mental image, but whichever it is, it is quite distinct from any other moment that has arisen before or is about to arise after it. The moment before one has gone and the moment come does not exist yet. So consciousness can only ever be momentary and such a momentary phenomenon would never qualify for the title of 'self'. Thus, the mind or awareness that seems to be behind all our experience cannot be the self either.

At the end of our analysis we arrive at the conclusion that the self is simply a vague and convenient concept that we project now here and now there onto a stream of experiences, and is nothing in or of itself. One may wish to maintain that the 'self' is the continuity of the stream of physical and mental events that constitute a personality and that as such it does not have to have the characteristics of being lasting, single and independent. This is simply a redefinition of the term 'self', but it does not explain our emotional behaviour at all. Buddhism is not telling anyone that he should believe that he has a self or that he does not have a self. It is saying that when one looks at the way one suffers and the way one thinks and responds emotionally to life, it is as if one believed there were a self that was lasting, single, and independent and yet on closer analysis no such self can be isolated and found. In other words the skhandas are empty of self.

In terms of relative reality, however, because one is so emotionally attached to one's concept of self, all one's mental patterning and habits of thought (samskaras) feed and strengthen the idea. Furthermore, the actions that one performs in the belief that it is the self-acting serve to create the 'world' that one finds oneself in. In other words, although there is no self in absolute terms, in terms of relative one still has to suffer the results of one's past good and bad habits.

To illustrate the point, take, for example, a candle flame. One can, in a general way, say something like, "That flame has been burning all day." However, in absolute terms, no flame has been burning all day. The flame was never the same flame from one moment to the next. There was no single, independent, lasting flame there at all. There is no such thing as a flame as such, nevertheless it is still meaningful to talk about flames.

When one meditates on the emptiness of the skhandas, one simply sees them as they are; there is nothing solid and real about them, they are not a lasting, independent, separate self and there is no such self in them. Just as in a dream, once one sees that the person in the dream is not really the oneself, any suffering that one may have felt on account of being burnt or chased by a tiger, for example, simply fades away. In the same way, when one focuses one's attention inwardly on the absence of self in the skhandas, all suffering caused by taking the skhandas to be the self fades away.

Then the mind can rest peacefully in empty space, with perfect confidence and assurance. Through meditation in this manner all suble doubts are worn away and the mind can rest naturally in emptiness.

DairyLama

A long time ago somebody said "There are no things, only processes". I think that's a useful way of thinking about it.